Mac can't format HDD

I have an Iomega HDD 80GB USB 2.0 External Desktop Hard Drive. I have used this hard drive before on both my Mac and a PC, and it worked fine. The other day, I plugged in my external hard drive so that I could use it to back up my system on Time Machine. The external drive had some files on it already, so when I plugged it into my Mac, Time Machine said that I would have to format it. So I went ahead and allowed it to start formatting the disk, but then system preferences froze while it was formatting. I couldn't eject the drive so I had to force quit and restarted my computer. Then when I plugged in the external drive again, the computer said that it could not read the disk. So I opened Disk Utility and tried to reformat the hard drive. However, Disk Utility froze about a minute after it started reformatting the external hard drive, while the progress bar was on "Creating partition map". Once again, I had to force quit the application and I restarted my computer. Upon plugging my external hard drive in AGAIN, the computer said it could not read the disk so I tried reformatting the hard drive (through Disk Utility) yet another time, and it froze again. I tried this again and it froze again. I tried plugging the hard drive into a PC, and it did not show up in "My Computer." It did, however, show up in Device Manager, and Device Manager said that the device was working fine (I also checked all of the USB Root Hubs etc, as per the instructions in the Iomega support Answer ID 1235). So basically, the computer said the device had no problems, yet there was no way I could actually see any of the files on the disk (or format it) because it wasn't showing up in My Computer. And I can't seem to format it on my Mac because it freezes up every time.
Is there any way I can format this hard drive?? Is it corrupted and unusable? What are some other things I can try?
Edit: I also tried to reformat the drive by partitioning it in Disk Utility (following the directions on the Iomega support article) and Disk Utility froze when the progress bar said "Creating partition map."

I have the same drive and the same problem. The drive itself is fine. I took it to work and formatted under windows - no problem. Still can't get it to work with OS X.

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